As the Crows Fall | ONC 2020 Grand Winner

ii | Call the Crows

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Mu'en collects people the way targets collect bullets.

Quickly, precisely, jaggedly, delicately. There isn't much room for error when a bullet leaves a gun, and there is no damage Mu'en wishes to take from a person if he does not know what damage to expect.

Bullets, deadly though they are, are maddeningly predictable, if only you know their caliber. Their trajectory is calculable by sight, the bullet by the type of gun and the destruction by all that leads up to the hole torn through paper at the end of the line. Bullets are everything the shooter needs them to be, and people, at their core, are very much the same.

Mu'en finds people to be exhaustive, draining creatures, and if he must have them in his life, then he wants those who will deal him the least suffering. He wants those whose faults he can predict.

Over the years, he adds them one by one to the libraries of his life, each perfected, molded, chosen to be one of his many things.

He collects people like a bank does money, like an artist does paper, like a student does dreams. Something to use, something to study, something to cherish, but never to keep.

He doesn't expect to love one.

When Shiyuan walks into his life and refuses to leave, when he doesn't fit in it the way he should, when he somehow makes himself worth something to Mu'en, he does not have a place to put him.

Mu'en collects people the way he does books on a shelf.

But Shiyuan, he holds like a vice.

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It is fascinating to see what parts of a person you can take and break and piece back together again.

It is devastating to see what pieces no longer fit.

Mu'en does this every day of his life, with people, with systems, with society as a whole. He takes the components which comprise existence and fit them together in ways that the world despises.

It is how he became Longtou. Crime master.

His masked face adorns the back pages of newspapers, the walls of alleyways, the doors of crime scenes, the windows of the coffee shop he owns. It startles him to see it. Everywhere he goes, his own legacy follows him, and even the darkest corners of the emptiest rooms bear witness to the laws he's rendered worthless.

Today, heavy silence blankets the warehouse at the edge of town. It always does. There is something about this warehouse, something removed, that simply makes it a touch too untouchable to the residents of Luoxia. They see it, photograph it, wonder about it, but they do not near it. They do not dare to.

Mu'en sits in his wheelchair at the steps of this warehouse and waits, rolling the corner of his arrest warrant between his fingers. The police, the jingcha, do not have a name or a face to match to his crimes, and that is how he wishes to keep it. The price on his head is high and there are many who would have it for money alone. Crime does not come without a price, after all.

Mu'en expected death the moment he stood on that platform before his men and took the title of Longtou from a dead man. He expected to be hunted like a deer in the woods, to be sought after and hated, to have those who would wish his head served on a platter and his heart cast into fire. He is guilty of treating his men like pawns in a game, but he never expected them to be stolen from the board. Not like this.